Year: 2006

As many of you know, yesterday was the business launch of Office, including Visio. The full consumer launch (i.e. boxes available in stores) will happen in January. In the meantime, you can download a trial version of the final product. We have released the latest versions of the Visio Viewer and the SDK.

Along with developers building applications exclusively for Visio, there are a lot of people who do development across Office (or are thinking about it). The Office MSDN team has done a great job putting together a poster that gives you a sense of what type of development is possible and how Visio fits in. For…

We’re starting to roll out some more developer and power user documentation on the new features in Visio 2007. I’ve written a couple brief posts on customizing Data Graphics, but now there is a full article available here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa468596.aspx

With this post I’ll start a new series designed to give a little more detail behind some of the more interesting ShapeSheet functions. As the documentation for SETF says, this function is designed to let you set the value for a specific cell in the ShapeSheet from any other cell. This is one of the…

For those of you who are developing with Visio (particularly if you have some experience), I’d like to recommend Graham Wideman’s book: Visio 2003 Developer’s Survival Pack. The author is one of our MVPs and is as knowledeable about Visio as just about anyone I know. The book contains great detail on just about everything around Visio…

With this post I’m trying out something new: I’ll be posting some videos to give you a little bit of a better flavor of some of the features in Visio. One of the Visio 2007 features that is most compelling visually is AutoConnect. Here is the basic description of what I’m doing in the video:…

The Office team has put up video of all of the presentations from the Office Developer Conference held this past spring. At the conference, I presented a Visio 2007 session focusing on building solutions using the new Data APIs. The direct link to the video of the session is available here. The quality of the…

The default PivotDiagram layout is a hierarchy with spacing of 9.5 mm (or 0.375 in) between shapes. This works pretty seamlessly for a lot of data out there, but one of the powerful aspects of the PivotDiagram feature is your control over how your shapes are laid out. PivotDiagrams use the standard Visio layout feature…

We’re always looking for ways to better understand the needs and concerns of Visio customers. To that end, one of the tools we use is the Visio Customer Council. Council members are uniquely positioned to have their voices heard by the designers and developers of Visio. Members can provide feedback on proposed features and interact,…